TV News LIES

CNN anchor Jake Tapper ripped President Trump’s attacks on the media as “deranged” on Friday after the president lashed out against what he views as “treasonous” coverage of the conflict with Iran.

“Reporting these facts isn’t treason, and it’s deranged for any president to say such a thing and potentially dangerous for the reporters he’s accusing of treason,” Tapper said during a segment on “The Lead.”

Trump scolded New York Times (NYT) reporter David Sanger earlier Friday as the longtime correspondent was pressing him about the U.S. military’s 38-day bombing campaign inside Iran.

Sanger wrote in a NYT report earlier this month that the U.S.’s core objectives in the war “clearly have not” been achieved, despite the Trump administration’s repeated assertions that they had. He noted that Tehran’s nuclear stockpile remained untouched, and the sides appeared no closer to a deal on constraining the program.

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The federal hantavirus response has laid bare the impact of the Trump administration’s cuts to U.S. and global health, renewing concerns among public health experts that the U.S. is not prepared for a bigger health crisis.

Career scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been fired or left the agency, and there are far fewer people available to respond to outbreaks and to communicate with the public.

That has largely left political appointees in charge of updating the public.

As the administration scales its response, several top health officials who were previously some of the most publicly critical of the COVID-19 response must now communicate the accurate level of risk posed by the hantavirus.

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After several months of heated arguments over whether the Democratic National Committee (DNC) should release its autopsy report on the 2024 election, the dispute has neared a boiling point. With one recent media appearance after another, the DNC chair, Ken Martin, has set off fierce criticism and even derision, while offering notably illogical explanations for keeping the autopsy secret.

As the controversy simmers, no one has more at stake than the party’s latest standard-bearer. Kamala Harris, apparently preparing for another run, leads in polls for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. One of the last things she needs is a widely publicized narrative from the DNC about failures of her 2024 campaign. A maxim from George Orwell applies: “who controls the past controls the future” and “who controls the present controls the past”.

At present, Martin is holding firm to his announcement last December that he would not fulfill his promise to make the autopsy public. That was a boon to Harris, but this spring’s escalating uproar over the decision has given her reason to distance herself from it.

Last week, NBC News reported that Harris was “signaling that she has no problem with a public airing of what went wrong last time – telling donors she believes the Democratic National Committee should release its buried autopsy of her failed 2024 campaign, according to a person who has heard the conversations”.

But Harris hasn’t made any public statement that she believes the autopsy should be released. Her “signaling” is evidently an effort to disassociate herself from the taint of Martin’s unpopular decision without openly opposing it.

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A Tennessee school district has banned Roots, the author Alex Haley’s groundbreaking novel and one of the most renowned and influential works about the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

Knox county schools (KCS) took that step under a state law that has disappeared hundreds of titles from school libraries and alarmed advocates of free expression.

First published in 1976, Roots: The Saga of an American Family tells the story of Kunta Kinte, who was brutally stolen from his home in the Gambia and taken to North America to be sold into the nightmare of slavery.

The novel chronicles six generations of Kinte’s descendants in the US to Haley himself; won the Pulitzer prize; and was later adapted into a mini-series.

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The Pentagon has quietly dismantled a program it is legally required to operate to prevent and respond to civilian deaths in US military operations, according to its internal watchdog.

A report released by the department’s inspector general concluded the US military no longer has the people, tools or infrastructure needed to comply with two federal statutes requiring it to maintain a functioning civilian casualty policy, and operate a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence (CP CoE).

Donald Trump’s administration has been accused of making deep cuts to the Pentagon’s civilian harm mitigation and response (CHMR) program, designed to handle training and procedures critical in limiting civilian harm in theaters of war.

While the program has not been officially canceled, the inspector general’s report said that funding had ended for a data management platform; committee meetings had halted; and many dedicated personnelhad been lost or reassigned.

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The Texas Supreme Court on Friday shut down Gov. Greg Abbott’s (R) effort to penalize the dozens of Democratic legislators who fled the state last summer in an attempt to block a rare mid-decade redistricting effort.

Abbott asked the all-Republican court in an emergency petition last August to find that the Texas House’s Democratic leader, Houston Rep. Gene Wu, had vacated his office when he and more than 50 other Democrats refused to return to Texas to pass a new GOP-drawn congressional map.

In a Friday opinion, authored by Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock, the Lone Star State‘s high court rejected the request.

“Whatever wrong may have been committed by the absent House members, the Texas Constitution’s internal political remedies, none of which involve the judicial branch, were sufficient to the task of restoring the House’s ability to do business,” wrote Blacklock, who was first appointed to the bench by Abbott in 2018.

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Tina Peters, a former elections clerk who was the first local official convicted over efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, will go free from prison after Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) commuted her sentence Friday.

Polis told Colorado Public Radio earlier in the day from the governor’s office that he would cut her almost nine-year prison sentence to 4 1/2 years. By June 1, she will have been in prison for more than 600 days.

The governor added that Peters “did not interfere with any election, did not have to do with ballot counting, but it was illegal access to the computer room.”

“She thought she was trying to back up the software before it was updated,” Polis said. “She did it illegally. There’s no question about it. And she deserves to go to prison. And I think this is a more appropriate, even harsh, frankly, sentence for that crime.”

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday rejected a bid by Virginia Democrats to revive a voting map designed to help their party wrest control of the U.S. House of Representatives from President Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans in November’s midterm elections.

The justices declined to halt a ruling by Virginia’s top court that blocked a voter-approved pro-Democratic map for the midterms, denying a request by Democrats in the state. The court’s action came in a brief and unsigned order that provided no rationale. No justice publicly dissented.

Democrats pursued the revised electoral map - crafted to flip four Republican-held U.S. House of Representatives seats to Democrats - as part of a nationwide political battle initiated last year by Trump to redraw the boundaries of U.S. electoral districts for partisan benefit.

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